Golden Fleece Read online

  Pollux looked exactly like Orpheus had before its unscheduled flight, except for its name and serial number, of course, which were painted in half-meter-high Zapf Humanist letters on its silver hull.

  The ship was held off the floor by telescoping landing gear ending in fat rubber tires, one unit at the angle of the boomerang, two others halfway out along either swept-back wing. The wing tips were about at Aaron’s eye level. He bent from the waist and beetled under, out of my view. The sounds of his movement, muffled by the wings, echoing strangely off the lander’s boron-reinforced titanium-alloy hull, were difficult to follow.

  Suddenly he stopped moving. I triangulated on his medical-telemetry channel and surmised that he must be directly beneath the central cylindrical hull of the lander. That part of the ship hung less than a meter off the hangar floor, so he couldn’t be standing. Ah—a slight sign of exertion on his telemetry, followed by a small involuntary EKG shudder. He’d just lain down, the initial touch of the cold metal of the deck floor against his back causing his heart to jump. More than likely, he had aligned his torso along Pollux’s axis. That would mean in front of his head and far off to his left and right he would be able to see the landing gear.

  I heard him bang some tools about, then a loud ratchet sound. That probably meant that he was using a key wrench to remove an access panel. Which one? Probably the AA/9, a square service door measuring a meter on a side. Suddenly, my wall camera irised down ever so slightly, meaning he must have turned on his flashlight. I knew what he would be seeing as he played the yellow beam around the interior: fuel lines ranging in thickness from a centimeter to five centimeters; part of the bulbous main tank, probably covered with mechanic’s grease; hydraulics, including pumps and valves; a reticulum of fiber optics, mostly bundled together with plastic clips; and an analog fuel-pressure gauge with a circular white dial.

  “What are you doing?” I asked into the hangar, spacing the words slightly to compensate for the echo he must be experiencing because of the opened hull cavity above his head.

  “Just routine maintenance,” he said. Even with his unreadable telemetry, I knew he was lying.

  He banged things around for three minutes, twenty seconds, but I was unable to tell what he was up to. He then dropped something that made a clang followed by a second, quieter metallic sound. His vise grips had rubber handles: he must have dropped them and they’d bounced, banging the deck twice. He gathered them up. Just at the threshold of my hearing, I detected a squeaking as their jaws were drawn shut, but I couldn’t hear any impact from them closing, so he must have clamped them onto something soft. The fuel line leading to the pressure gauge was made of rubber tubing— that was probably it.

  I could hear Aaron groaning a bit, and his EKG showed that he was exerting himself. A jet of amber liquid shot forward from under Pollux into my field of view. He must have used his pair of shears to cut the fuel line. The jet died quickly, so I guessed that he’d snipped it past where his vise grips were constricting the flow.

  “Aaron,” I said, “I fear you are damaging Pollux. Please tell me what you are trying to accomplish.”

  He ignored me, clanging away out of my sight. I’d figured out by now what he was up to: he was replacing the lander’s fuel gauge. “Aaron, perhaps it isn’t safe for you to be working on the fuel supply by yourself.”

  Even Aaron’s poker-faced telemetry couldn’t hide his reaction to what he saw after he’d connected the new gauge and seen the reading. Pollux’s main fuel tank was only one-quarter full.

  “They’re all like this, aren’t they, JASON?”

  “Like what?”

  “Dammit, you know what I’m talking about. Diana’s ship didn’t use a lot of fuel.” Even echoing inside the lander’s hull, his voice had a dangerous edge. “It never had much to begin with.”

  “I’m sure you are mistaken, Aaron. Why would UNSA supply us with insufficient fuel?” I sent a brief radio signal to Pollux, activating the lander’s electrical system.

  “These ships could never take off again,” said Aaron. “Not from a planetary gravity well. They’d be stranded the first time they landed.”

  It wasn’t as bad as all that, of course. “There’s plenty of fuel for traveling around Colchis.”

  “Just no way to make orbit again. Terrific.”

  Pollux began to crouch down, its landing gear retracting into the hull.

  “Jesus!” I could hear the metal clasps on Aaron’s tool belt banging against the floor as he rolled first to his left, then to his right. The lander came down more quickly. The distant boomerang wing tips were less than a half-meter off the hangar floor; the distended belly hung even lower.

  “Damn you, JASON!” Judging by the pattern of clicks from the metal fasteners, Aaron had rolled into a ball, scrunching into the opening he’d made in the hull by removing the AA/9 access plate. A ricochet crack of breaking bone echoed through the hangar. Lower, lower, lo—Action interrupted, error level one. The legs stopped retracting. Aaron had managed to cut the hydraulic line with his shears. But I had him trapped, his chest constricted, his respiration ragged.

  “Aaron!” Kirsten Hoogenraad’s voice sang out into the hangar. Dammit, when I’d pulled her telemetry five minutes ago, she’d been over four hundred meters from here! I should have checked more frequently.

  Aaron banged something against the inside of Pollux. Kirsten rushed to the source of the clanking sound. She stopped, mouth agape, looking at the spectacle of a boomerang lander flopped on its belly at the end of the row of such craft standing erect. “Aaron?”

  A muffled voice: “Kirs-ten—”

  “Oh, Dr. Hoogenraad,” I said, quickly, smoothly, tones of concern in my voice. “He was monkeying around with Pollux’s fuel lines. He must have accidentally served the hydraulic lead to the landing gear.”

  The voice again, wan and raspy: “No, it’s—”

  Clang! The safeties on the outer hangar-deck wall kicked aside. Kirsten wouldn’t know the sound, but it was obvious from his EEG that Aaron recognized it. He fell silent.

  “I need forklifts, stat,” Kirsten snapped.

  The portals to the cargo holds dilated and four orange vehicles rolled out, floating above the floor, thanks to their pink antigravity underbellies. One of the forklifts was the same one I had used to chase Diana into the hangar six days before. I positioned the forklifts’ pink gravity-control prongs beneath the wings of Pollux and began to raise the lander. I had them lift it well above its normal resting position, so that I could clearly see Aaron. He was stuck in a fetal position, and there was blood on his face and right arm. Kirsten scuttled under to him. “Get me out from here,” he said.

  “I should call for a stretcher—”

  “Now! Get me out now!”

  She gently grabbed his ankles and pulled. Aaron let out a yowl of pain as his right arm hit the floor.

  “Your arm—”

  “Later. We’ve got to get out of the hangar.”

  “I hope Aaron will be okay,” I said.

  “I’m going to talk to you, computer!” he called as Kirsten helped him to his feet. “We’re going to talk!”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  It’s funny to see the world as a human sees it. For one thing, it’s so information-poor. The colors are muted and limited to the narrow span they arrogantly refer to as visible light. Heat radiation can’t be seen at all, apparently, and sounds are dull. I look at Aaron’s old apartment aboard the Argo and I see garish patterns in ultraviolet on the petals of the flowers, see the dull glow of the hot-water pipes behind the walls, hear the gentle hum of the air conditioner, the throbbing of the engines, the rustling of the springtime-yellow fibers of the seasonal carpeting as Aaron walks across them.

  Aaron, apparently, senses none of those things. To him, the petals are simply white; the walls, uniform beige. And the noises? He has the required biological equipment to detect most of them, but he seems to use some sort of input mask to keep them from registering on his
consciousness. Fascinating.

  Of course, I’m not seeing through his eyes. Rather, I’m looking in on his memories, on the patterns of recollection stored in the interlinkings of his neurons. It’s disorienting enough trying to deal with Aaron’s different sensory perceptions. But what’s even more difficult to work with is his tendency not to remember clearly. He recalls some things in great detail, but other parts are generalized beyond recognizability.

  Take his apartment for instance. When I look at it through my cameras, I see it precisely. It measures sixteen meters, ninety-seven centimeters by twelve meters, zero centimeters, by two meters, fifty centimeters, and is divided into four rooms. But Aaron doesn’t know that. He doesn’t even know that the ratio of the apartment’s length to its width is one to the square root of two, and that’s probably the most aesthetic thing about his home, given what a slob he is.

  Further, it’s obvious to me that the living room is half the size of the whole apartment; the bedroom is half the size of the living room; and the remaining quarter is split evenly between the bathroom and tiny office.

  But Aaron doesn’t see those proportions. He thinks, for instance, that the bedroom he shared with his wife Diana is tiny, claustrophobic, a trap. He sees it as only about two-thirds of its actual dimensions.

  “You see, but you do not observe,” Sherlock Holmes said to Dr. Watson. Aaron certainly doesn’t observe. Oh, he recalls that there are some framed holographic prints on the walls of the apartment, but he doesn’t even remember how many there are over the couch. He has five fuzzy rectangular dabs of color in his memory, when in fact there are six such pictures hanging. And as for what the pictures represent—a chalice, a pewter tea service, an intricate mechanical clock, two different Louis XIV chairs, and an astrolabe, all from Diana’s collection of antiques left back on Earth—he recalls nothing, at least not in this set of memories.

  Most revelatory of all is the way he sees himself. I’m surprised to find that many of his memories contain visions of him as if seen from a short distance away. I never record anything except from my camera’s point-of-view, and I only ever see part of myself in my memories if one camera’s field of vision happens to overlap another, so that I can look myself in the eyes. But Aaron does see himself, does visualize his face, his body.

  Does that mean these are memories of memories? Scenes he has replayed in his mind over and over again, each repetition, like an analog recording, adding new errors, new fuzziness, but also new conjecture? Intriguing, this wetware memory. Fallible, yet editable.

  Subjective.

  The way he sees himself has only a passing connection with reality. For one thing, he has himself backward, flipped along his axis of symmetry, short, sandy hair parted the wrong way. I wonder why—of course: he usually only sees himself as a reflection in a mirror.

  He also sees his nose as disproportionately big. Now it is a bit of a honker by statistical overall averages, but it’s hardly the monstrous appendage he thinks it is. Interesting. If it bothers him so much, I wonder why he hasn’t had it surgically altered? Ah, there’s the answer, hidden in a complex webbing of neurons: plastic surgery is vain, he thinks, only for movie stars, perverts, and—oh, yes—reconstruction after an accident.

  He sees his head as larger than it really is compared to his body, and his face as a disproportionately significant part of his head. He’s also not aware of just how crummy his posture is.

  What’s just as fascinating is how he views Diana. He sees her as she was two years ago. He’s unaware of the tiny reticulum of lines that has begun to appear at the corners of her eyes. He also tends to see her hair as breaking over her shoulders, even though for over a year she has kept it trimmed so that it barely touches them. Does that mean he’d stopped looking at her, stopped really seeing her? Incredible: to see without seeing. What does he feel as he gazes at her from across the room? What is he thinking? Accessing …

  Nothing lasts forever. Is that a rationalization? Maybe. Or maybe it’s just the truth. My parents—my adopted parents, that is—broke up when I was eleven. Two-thirds of all marriages don’t last. Hell, even a quarter of limited-duration marriage contracts end up being breached.

  I look at Diana and I see everything I should want. She’s beautiful and intelligent. No, she’s intelligent first, and then beautiful. Put it in that order, you pig. Christ, is that what this is all about? Hormones run amuck? If it is just about sex, then … then I’m not the man I thought I was. Diana is pretty—is beautiful, damn it. But Kirsten, Kirsten is gorgeous. Stacked. And her hair. It’s like a chocolate waterfall, cascading over her shoulders, down her back. Every time I see her, I want to reach out and touch it, stroke it, wrap it around my penis, make love to it, to her. Flowing tresses. I finally understand what that phrase means. It means Kirsten Hoogenraad.

  And brains? Diana is an astrophysicist, for Pete’s sake. She’s one of the brightest women—brightest people—that I’ve ever met. She can talk knowledgeably about almost anything. About great books that I’ve never read. About great works of art that I’ve never understood. About exotic places I’ve never been.

  I wanted Diana so badly just eighteen months ago. I risked everything. My mother will never forgive me for marrying a goy, but then, my mother will be dead by the time we get back. She’ll carry that hurt, the pain of what I did, to her grave. And now I want to give up on Diana?

  But eighteen months was an impossibly long time ago, and Earth is impossibly distant. Whatever I do now, my mother will never know—and what she doesn’t know can’t hurt her.

  But I’ll know. And what about Diana? If I do pursue Kirsten, how will Diana take it? Our marriage contract is up in six months. She hasn’t asked me yet if I want to renew it. She has no reason to think I won’t, I guess. Or maybe she’s just being pragmatic. She knows that no renewal is possible until ninety days before the expiration date.

  Why don’t I just wait the six months? May, June, July, August, September, October. That’s nothing compared to the time we’ve already spent in this tin can. Patience, Aaron. Patience.

  But I can’t wait. I don’t want to wait. Every time I see Kirsten I get this feeling, this hollowness inside, this hunger. I want her. God, how I want her!

  Waiting for the marriage expiration is a formality anyway, isn’t it? The marriage is over now, really. Besides, who knows whether Kirsten will be available six months from now. It’s no secret that that ape Clingstone has the hots for her. Christ, the way he comes on to her. No finesse. But Kirsten doesn’t want him, can’t prefer him. He’s a moron, a shallow person. Oh, sure, he’s handsome in a Neanderthal sort of way, but looks aren’t everything.

  Or are they? What do I really know about Kirsten besides the fact that she’s an absolute stunner? Those legs that just go on and on; those breasts, large and perfect and round and firm. And her face, her smile, her eyes. But what do I know about her? Well, she’s a doctor. Dutch. Trained in Paris. Never been married. I wonder if she’s a virgin. Oh, scratch that. Get real, Aaron.

  But what else do I know? Christ, I don’t even know if she’s Jewish. That’s the first question my mom always asked. “Mom, I met a nice girl today.”

  “Oh,” she’d say, “is she Jewish?” I don’t give a fuck what her religion is. Of course, maybe she doesn’t want to have anything to do with a Jew.

  Stuff that. God, the old teachings die hard, don’t they? She must know I’m a Jew—you don’t get a name like Aaron Ross-man anywhere else. So I’m a Jew and she doesn’t mind. She’s probably not a Jew, and that’s fine with me. Sorry, Mom, but it is. Anyway, she’ll find out soon enough. Circumcision has fallen out of favor among Christians, after all.

  Soon enough? Sounds like I’ve made up my mind, doesn’t it?

  But do I really want to do this? Diana and I, we’ve built a life together. We’ve got interests in common, share the same friends. Barney, Pamela, Vincent, I-Shin. What are they going to think?

  Fuck them. It’s none of their damne
d business. This is between me and Diana. And Kirsten. Besides, I can be discreet. Hell, if that goddamned JASON can’t read me, I’m sure nobody else can—not even Diana. She’ll never know.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The excrement hit the ventilator. As soon as he got out of the hospital, Aaron stormed into his apartment, his right arm wrapped in a bone-knitting web, his angular face flushed with fury. “Damn it, JASON! You tried to kill me.”

  I managed to get the door shut fast enough so that the last two words of his exclamation were cut off from those on the grassy lawn in front of Aaron’s apartment. Fortunately, the designers had seen fit to soundproof the living quarters. Still, I’m sure that at least one of the passers-by, the boorish Harrison Cartwright Jones, would be sure to ask Aaron what all the commotion had been about—that is, if anyone ever saw Aaron again.

  My eyes in Aaron’s living room were on an articulated stalk atop the desk. I swung them around slowly to look at him and spoke calmly, reasonably, with a gentle singsong lilt to my words. “What happened with the Pollux was an accident, Aaron.”

  “Bullshit! You lowered that ship on me.”

  “You did cut the hydraulic line.”

  “To stop it from lowering farther, damn you.”

  I tried to sound a little miffed. “There’s no reason to blame me for your carelessness.”

  He was pacing the length of the room, only his left hand free to be thrust deep into his pocket. “What about the empty fuel tank?”

  I paused before replying, not because I didn’t have an answer ready, but in hopes that Aaron would think I had been taken aback by such an unreasonable question. “You spilled a great deal of fuel into the hangar. We all know how quickly it evaporates. You would have a hard time proving that you didn’t just spill the rest with your bungling.”

  “The tanks on the other landers are mostly empty, too.”